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It often occurs to me to add an edit summary to a question-edit immediately after submitting the edit, especially if the changes aren't obvious (formatting etc.). So I:

  1. Click "edit" again.
  2. Fill in the summary
  3. Click on "Save Edits".

The 'edit' (no actual change has been made to the title/body/tags) is accepted, but the summary doesn't show up, i.e. it is silently rejected.

I don't think it should work this way because the summary has been added by the original editor within the original edit's edit-window. In fact if I remember correctly, it to used to work as expected earlier; so perhaps this is a recent change.

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  • 22
    This is annoying - the only way around it that I know of is by changing something in the body along with the edit summary, then edit it immediately again to undo that particular change.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn Mod
    Commented Apr 13, 2012 at 20:18
  • 1
    @BoltClock'saUnicorn It's easier to add or remove trailing space in some line -- no need to undo.
    – user259867
    Commented Aug 4, 2015 at 16:12
  • 3
    @Normal Human: That's what I do, but I don't like leaving stray whitespace in my edits, feels untidy.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Commented Aug 4, 2015 at 16:40
  • You can always replace a return with <br>. No stray whitespace or visible edits needed!
    – Mr Lister
    Commented Dec 27, 2015 at 14:30
  • Give 24 hours to edit Edit summary meta.stackexchange.com/q/289244
    – qdinar
    Commented Jan 4, 2017 at 0:56

1 Answer 1

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As noted in this duplicate question, it's possible to edit the edit summary during the grace period if you make at least one other edit at the same time. However, if the edit is all correct apart from the summary, it's strange to force a pointless edit just to be able to change the summary, and worth making the change to the edit summary itself work directly.

This feature request requested combining the edit summaries of the two edits, but was declined due to misunderstanding how a grace period edit works. The sentiment is still correct, though; what should happen is that a change to the edit summary during the grace period should be considered as an edit to the post, even if the post itself doesn't change.

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